“Because our species’ time on Earth is very likely to be finite, we should be doing everything we can to colonize nearby worlds — particularly Mars — to increase our odds of survival. Putting a permanent colony of humans on Mars would be an insurance policy against a civilization-ending catastrophe here at home, like an errant comet or an accidental outbreak of thermonuclear war.”

“Pornhub, the largest pornography site on the internet, said its US traffic ‘plummeted to some of the lowest levels we’ve seen in years.’ From 1-2pm ET on Monday, when the eclipse was near or at its peak in many parts of the country, traffic was down 54% from an average day in the US state of Wyoming, for example, where Pornhub saw the steepest declines. There were also sharp drops in traffic in Nebraska (-42%), Idaho (-40%), and Oregon (-39%) during that time.”

“Clean eating – whether it is called that or not – is perhaps best seen as a dysfunctional response to a still more dysfunctional food supply: a dream of purity in a toxic world. To walk into a modern western supermarket is to be assailed by aisle upon aisle of salty, oily snacks and sugary cereals, of “bread” that has been neither proved nor fermented, of cheap, sweetened drinks and meat from animals kept in inhumane conditions.”

“Human brains tend to remember what’s novel, or new. If the story of your life doesn’t change much over time, you’ll be less likely to remember certain details. This is essentially why life flies by even if the days seem to last forever.”

The supercomputer will tackle the most difficult challenges facing the artificial intelligence industry…by reading through Reddit forums.

… DGX-1 will take on Reddit to learn faster and to chat more accurately. “You can take a large amount of data that would help people talk to each other on the internet, and you can train, basically, a chatbot, but you can do it in a way that the computer learns how language works and how people interact.”

And finally: protect the nerds. A computer programmer from Seattle is doing more to alleviate world poverty, hunger, and disease through the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation than any other person in America right now. Nerds create vaccines. Nerds engineer bridges and roadways. Nerds become teachers and librarians. We need those obnoxiously smart people, because they make the world a better place. We can’t have them cowering before a society that rolls their eyes at every word they say.

Maybe intellectuals have always been persecuted and shoved in lockers, but something in my gut tells me we’re at a low point — where social media interaction has replaced genuine debate and political discourse, where politicians are judged by whether we’d want to have a beer with them, where scientific consensus is rejected, where scientific research is underfunded, where journalism is drowning in celebrity gossip.

A 19.44 megabits per second upload speed is not only much faster than the radio frequency data transmission typically used in space exploration, it’s actually nearing the upper end of what you can get at home.

Getting food from the farm to our fork eats up 10% of the total U.S. energy budget, uses 50% of U.S. land, and swallows 80% of all freshwater consumed in the United States. Yet, 40% of food in the United States today goes uneaten. This not only means that Americans are throwing out the equivalent of $165 billion each year, but also that the uneaten food ends up rotting in landfills as the single largest component of U.S. municipal solid waste where it accounts for a large portion of U.S. methane emissions.